If you hate New Year’s resolutions, you may be a little gun-shy about trying to make any changes to your life in January. Just on principle. I don’t love New Year’s resolutions, since they rarely live to see February, and therefore seem a bit useless to me. But I do like to spend some time around the end …

The knock against Seneca, even in his own time, was that he was a hypocrite. For a Stoic, he was obscenely rich. For a philosopher, he was uncomfortably close to the center of power and guilty of all the compromises such a position entails. Seneca was aware of this contradiction too. He even wrote about it. “Why …

It’s remarkable how much your life can change when you add one new skill to your arsenal. Many years ago, I was working on a project at my day job and I needed to deal with a number of tables of data. Messy data that needed a fair bit of cleaning up to be useful. Too …

Throughout his bestselling book, Principles, Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, sounds very much like a Stoic without knowingly stating it. As he writes in one passage, he learned to see pain as a teacher—it almost became a game to him to figure out the hidden lessons in each painful …

1) Liberals care much more about policies that make them feel good about themselves than they do about policies that actually make life better for people. 2) That person in politics being compared to Hitler is really not very much like Hitler at all. 3) The bigger government gets, the worse it serves the people. …

The USA is not magic dirt. Nations are people. If you want to live like Haiti, bring in Haitians. They won’t become Americans, they’ll just make America more like Haiti. Which, if you are honest with yourself, is exactly what all the Germans did too. If you were granted the magical ability to decide America’s …

If you’re serious about getting things done in your life, then you need to have a regular weekly habit of reviewing the previous week and planning the next one. That sounds fun, doesn’t it? It’s right up there with changing the oil and cleaning the toilet on most people’s list of Things To Avoid Doing Pretty …

It was the Athenian statesman, Pericles, who would say that there was no shame in poverty. Only in not doing something about it. The Stoics would probably agree, though they might word it differently. They’d say, there’s no shame in poverty, only in not doing something with it. Seneca famously said that poverty was good for at least one …

Not long ago one of my friends asked me what my “unfair advantage” is. Everybody has one. Some people have several. An unfair advantage is something you do well that gives you an advantage in running your life. My immediate response was that I regularly schedule time to just think. I call it “think time” and it’s golden, …